The Color of a Dog Running Away

by Richard Gwyn

  I pushed him back down into a sitting position. Not hard, but hard enough to unbalance him, so rather than sitting down he flopped backwards and was now sprawled on his back across the two steps in the doorway. He glared at me from this undignified position.

  “Sorry, amigo,” I apologized, without much conviction. “Didn’t mean to send you tumbling. But it isn’t time to go. Haven’t finished yet. Unattended business. And not too steady myself this morning. Just to make sure of something, I have a favour to ask of you.”

  “Vino,” gasped the beggar. His solitary word. A nonsequitur, sure, but at least an active attempt at communication.

  “Okay, vino. Tell you what. I’ll buy the vino, and throw in a meal if you think you can take solids without chucking up. But first I want to look at your chest. Your lovely tits. Las tetas del dragón.” I reached down to the top button of his coat.

  The beggar brushed away my hand and looked up, exasperated. Then, suddenly, with a breathtakingly full smile of rotting and broken teeth, he unbuttoned his coat and shirt to display the red and green dragon engraved on his chest.

  “See this?” he said, in his painfully articulated English, as though dredging the bottom of a vast lake in search of a few remaining fragments of the long-wrecked ship of language. “I share with you the sign of the dragon. Le plus beau du monde. I am the man of foc, as you suggest, mon semblable, mon frère.”

  He looked up and down the street cautiously while rebuttoning his coat.

  “Now we have a drink, amigo mio?” He held out a mittened hand for me to pull him up. I obliged.

  “You just want to drink? Or eat something,” I tried again.

  “Soup maybe. First vino.”

  “Okay, but I want information from you, got it?” I insisted.

  “Yeah, that’s cool. Just don’t get heavy, man.” This came fluently, as though it was a well-practised refrain.

  “Where the fuck did you pick up your English? ‘Heavy’? ‘Man’? The road to Katmandu?”

  I was now ravenously hungry, so my first obstacle was getting him into the bar without being asked to leave. I guided him quickly to one of the tables at the rear, in the section reserved for those who wanted to eat. So far, so good. Once we were seated it would be harder to evict us. Fortunately, Santiago had begun to regard me as a regular. He seemed in a good humour, and came to take our order himself.

  I asked for soup for the fire-eater and a set menu for myself, which consisted of a pasta dish, a meat course, and a salad. Wine was already on the table.

  The fire-eater looked around the bar uninterestedly, drained a glass of wine, and immediately poured another. This too he swallowed in one gulp. The third he poured slowly and held in both his hands, sipping from it at intervals while he spoke.

  “This same same crazy boy, come midnight, tu comprends? Arriba among the candelabra no the rooftops no the stars. Les étoiles. Catch me if you can. But only if competent in the art of flying. Same other crazy boy maybe sometime. He talk with forked Walkman. Blah blah blah. Mais moi, j’aime bien les Parisiennes. When? Last night; no, night before; no, night before that. Todo por triplicado. That’s what he said, más o menos. Everything in triplicate. Want a kinky time? No thanks, kind sir. I’m the Emperor of ice cream and will bide my own. You want, he said, you want play game with me? You musta be lunático. No go, no cigar. Bigtime. Up there, arriba. Comme les oiseaux. Les hirondelles du soir. Now to Africa. En suivant le soleil. Here come the sun. You know Beatle song? Let’s it be. Chacun, every boy and girl, not so much flying, commes les hirondelles, diving yes, the grace of god, merde, I never saw these things, but dreaming yes. Above the house of the yellow cross. Gone now.”

  He paused to wipe his mouth and refill his glass. Just then the soup arrived, along with my food. I didn’t want to break his flow but needed to know more about the place where I had found him.

  “Tell me more about this house of the yellow cross.”

  “Tell me more tell me more,” he mimicked, moving his head from side to side in what I assumed to be a parody of John Travolta in the movie Grease. There was something disturbing about the fire-eater’s familiarity with any such item of popular culture, even if years out of date.

  He slurped his way noisily through half the bowl of soup, dunking bread and swigging more wine. Then he picked up his monologue again.

  “The house of the yellow cross. A nightmare in every room. Waiting. They move behind closed doors. Silencio. I never saw them till that night. I could not recognise the sounds their feet made. And one, Français, le responsable. Eyes like knives. Soft voice. Qu’est-ce qu’il est? Un cura? Priest-man? Up on the roof. Stars so bright. Comme les diamants. Ha ha. But he is not laughing, he makes signs, brings me big sadness. I don’t want bread, only vino. Blood of the God. Hiding, je m’en cache. I see the wine. I want it. Bad night. Who are you? he asks, this same same guy, louder now. Moi? Le pauvre petit prince. Prince de La Macédonie. Look at the nose, the lips. I am of real blood. Royal, sanctus spiritus etcetera. And then, une ange. I swear to God. An angel, là-haut, among the cheminées. I saw the face of Mary Magdalene. Why me? No answer. None. Dancing, doucement. Like a trance. I see in Konya also one time. You know this? No matter. Rien. They make a fire, there arriba, sur les toits. Burning what? Je sais pas. Nothing, everything. It sparks and roars, but doucement, gentle like the dancing girl.”

  He drifted into some private memory, eyes closed, hands clasping the now-empty glass. I let him stay there for a while, forked my salad. With his eyes closed, I could more readily read his face. The deep lines folded across his face, those below the eyes rooting out and joining broader crevices that ran through the thick stubble on his cheeks. His was a face most profoundly occupied, one in which the accumulated debris of a lifetime was somehow revealed openly in these searing ducts.

  “Tell me about this girl,” I said. “The dancer.”

  The fire-eater looked up in surprise, so lost in his own internal perambulations that he was temporarily unaware he had an audience.

  “The girl? Not any girl, tits, pussy, ass. What you want, picture? For faire le rumtumtum? Wanging? Huh mister, what you are, a wanger? This not a girl for make play, I tell you, this an angel. Come down from el cielo. Yes.”

  The beggar harrumphed into his soup, then spooned out the remains into his mouth. He looked at me accusingly.

  “Vino,” he ordered. “Más.”

  I relayed this message to a young man helping out at the bar, who came over with a fresh litre of the basic red. I was about to pour when the fire-eater took the bottle from me and went through the same ritual as before, downing two glasses straight off, and pouring the third meditatively, letting it nest between his cupped hands while continuing to talk. I remembered what he had said: “todo por triplicado.” Everything in triplicate.

  “You want words. I give you message from the amber light, straight up.” He stared at me now, with an almost comic intensity. The wine had emboldened him.

  “Yes I know you longtime. You call me dog-man. But I am dragon. You see me breathe fire? That is my message. This my words, slowly slowly. Fire is better. Dog-man nothing. There, on the roof, where they jump high, swing yes, from top to top. No look down. Lose your head, same same. Always same but not crazy boy. Man now. I need to find the angel. See her more times, just to watch, capisce? But never again. Up there, I never see her once again. But I have the knot of doing, undoing. The knot, the knack. I learn quick, so quick. But one day I fall, too much vino. Snap the back. Hospital, here in the city of maravillas. Captain Marvels. Weeks too long. Hot food, no vino. Every night too they bring quackers. Quackers and cheese, fromage. This I hate. I steal money, down to the bottom of the hospital there’s a bar. Much cognac. They give me robe, hospital jama. No sleepers. I am in bar totalmente borracho, in my jama. Sleep on floor. They wake me up, I kick the place to shit, but tired, trop trop fatigué. Muy cansado. Call policia. Big fasaria, fuss. Later time, sleep, hell, back in room. Evening. More quackers,
more fromage. Let me out, I tell them. Back not good, but walking okay. Then they let me go. I never see nothing no more. Not people, not the angel. This same spring and summer. All nights and days looking, but not seeing nothing.”

  He slammed his glass down on the table and burped loudly, grabbing the bottle at once and refilling. A couple of heads turned our way. I wondered vaguely how long it would be before he got us thrown out, but knew that it could take some doing to get evicted from these Gothic quarter bars. I too was feeling quite drunk again, though the term was beginning to lose any real meaning since I was never truly sober—either in a state of withdrawal or else topping up, or else over the top, in which case I usually went into blackout. But there was an unpredictability about my companion that suggested he was capable of causing extreme offence, as I had witnessed all that time ago in Granada.

  I just needed to get one thing straight. If, as he appeared to be claiming, he had briefly joined the roof people, was it before or after I had seen him breathing fire in May? It seemed of great significance for me to know this. The limp that I had witnessed in May, if brought about by his fall, would suggest an earlier date for the experience he was describing. But if the angel he described was Nuria, as my obsession required, then her disappearance over the summer could be accounted for. When had he seen her (if it was her) dancing on the roof?

  “Tell me, when you were in hospital, when was that?”

  “Oh, much time. Too much time. Before, after.”

  “Was it before or after May this year?”

  He looked at me incredulously as though being expected to know such a thing was quite beyond the powers of any human being.

  “Before, after, during. My back hurt, but not so bad I couldn’t walk.”

  “Listen, mister fire-man, I need to know. When did you last see the angel?”

  He gaped like a fish coming up for air, then the corners of his mouth twisted into a disconcerting smile.

  “Ah. I know. I see you. You too want an angel you can call your own. You want to nail me down with days and dates. Times and days, weeks and mumps. This when, that when. Now and never. Before and after. En avant et aprés. During now and never. So you can go back there and make her disappear. Never never never never never. Jamais jamais jamais.”

  He had begun to shout, and was now badly deranged, leaning across the table towards me in a state of rage. He stood and waved his arms in the air as he spoke, continuing his tirade toward the restaurant in general.

  “I come here, messieurs, sit and give the words requested, demanded. I eat my soup, wipe my mouth with clean serviette, drink wine from a glass like a jennulman. I want from you nothing, none of you all. Nada. All time is hassle, hassle. I wait all my life for the angels to come and never once I see one. Now one come and everything is shit. I shit on you all. Me cago en todas partes, en la casa de Dios y en vuestras casas también. I shit in the house of the God and in all your houses also. I piss on your floor. I call you all wangers. Mira mira! Je suis le plus beau du monde!”

  He tore open his coat and shirt to display the rearing dragon, turning this way and that so the whole of the place could see him. The bar was crowded with men, mostly workers on their lunch break. While heads were turned towards the fire-eater, none appeared to be overly concerned. A couple of men seated behind him scowled, and a man standing at the bar cast us a canny glance, as though he had seen all this kind of thing before. But there was an air of expectancy in the room now, and people were waiting for this foreign maniac with the long dirty hair to either leave or else be thrown out.

  I wanted to pre-empt our ejection by paying the bill and leaving, but a general weariness had spread through my limbs, and I was rooted to my chair, waiting for the next development. In spite of my own despair, I felt compassion for the fire-eater and his troubles. But at this point the madman picked up the half-empty second bottle of wine and started swigging from it, staring wild-eyed around the room as he did so. Then, pulling its neck abruptly from his lips with a sucking noise, he brought the empty bottle down with a crack on the table’s edge, leaving a jagged weapon in his right hand. I let out a groan, fearing the worst. Then, with astonishing athleticism, Santiago leapt over the counter and made his way towards us. Simultaneously the two workers at the table behind the vagrant made a move to grab him, one of them twisting his right arm sharply behind his back. The remaining half of the bottle dropped to the floor and shattered. My dining companion offered no resistance; indeed, he seemed to have gone limp in the arms of the two men as they escorted him quickly towards the street door. Meanwhile I counted out some notes and handed them to Santiago, muttering a slurred apology as I did so. He merely nodded in response, and shrugged his shoulders. He told me I could stay if I wanted, but that the other guy, the lunatic, must never come here again. I thanked him and left hurriedly, wanting to catch up with the fire-eater. I was sure he had broken the bottle with the intention of harming himself rather than anybody else. I could see the next move coming, as he would turn the sharp end towards his own chest and twist the glass into the flesh.

  Out on the street I felt the sudden gust of a chill wind. I looked both ways up the street but there was no sign of the fire-eater. I searched the alleyways around the area, the immediate locality of the abandoned house, and then back up to Carders, where he would probably have gone in quest of more drink. But he had disappeared, and I knew then that I would not be seeing him again.

  19. MEETING WITH AN ANGEL

  As colder weather settled in, I carried a wasted, dissolute look, wore the same clothes for days on end, and ate very little. I hit the sea-bed during a protracted drug and drinking binge, a jag of hellish intensity, with Igbar Zoff and Sean Hogg (whose latest sale had been a moderate success). During that period I did not return home at all, in spite of my apartment being only a five minutes’ walk from theirs, crashing instead on their floor and picking up each morning, or afternoon, where we had left off the night before.

  Being with Zoff and Hogg was like eavesdropping on a marriage between two people who spend most of their lives arguing with each other, but cannot break out of the loop of mutual blame, and therefore it becomes a part of their identity as a couple. My mind was so blank much of the time that their interminable rows became as irrelevant to me as the indefinable colour of their sofa. We were all eventually reduced to drinking cheap Spanish gin and red wine, Zoff’s money from this most recent sale having pretty well gone and nothing new on the horizon. On the third or fourth day of camping out on their floor, I awoke in the early afternoon, automatically reached out for a bottle of wine as soon as my eyes were fully open, and looked around me. What I saw gave me cause for alarm.

  Hogg was lying on his back, spreadeagled on the sofa, wearing a pig’s mask over his face, which had slipped away to reveal an ear and one eye, belonging—I ascertained finally—to himself, Hogg, rather than the pig. Across the room from me, Igbar Zoff lay on the floor, also on his back, but (and this was an unprecedented sight) stark naked, with his arms and hands poised on his chest in the manner of a dog begging, hands flopping at right angles to the wrists. His limp penis lay across his crotch, a sad worm among the scrawny tangle of his pubic hair. He was breathing with tiny irregular snorting sounds, and occasionally moving one hand up to his face and brushing an invisible fly from his nose. I heaved myself upright and surveyed the room. Empty gin bottles lay strewn across the floor, punctuated by plates and saucers containing the decaying remnants of food and countless cigarette stubs. Books and magazines were scattered on the carpet and furniture, and on one unfolded magazine was a rectangle of glued-together cigarette papers and a small pile of tobacco. I picked up a loose chunk of hash from the floor, and put it on the coffee table. A wine-stain had formed around a knocked-over bottle of undrinkable vino tinto. On the carpet, there were hunks of stale bread spread with a pâté that resembled human excrement; a Coke can punctured with tiny holes, coated in a dark resinous wax; and a brightly hued cowpat of vomit. I gagged, r
ushing to the toilet just in time to reach the bowl, on my hands and knees, where I spent the next five minutes making noises like a dying ox. I washed my hands and face in cold water and put my head under the tap for a full minute, massaging icy water onto the back of my neck, and into my eyes and ears. Shocked into wakefulness, I returned to the living room, where neither of my companions had yet stirred, picked up the bottle of wine, and took another long slug. I brushed the debris off an armchair, sat down, and lit a cigarette. A smell resembling ammonia wafted over from Igbar’s direction and I realised, without surprise, that he had rolled over onto his side, and the rug beneath him was soaked in fresh urine. I sat there for a while, finished the wine, and smoked a second cigarette. Then, as quietly as possible, I picked my way across the floor towards the door and let myself out.

  It was the last day of October, the night on which the spirits of the dead were supposed to roam the earth—not that I would have noticed. Tomorrow would be November, and All Saints, a fiesta day. It was bright and sunny, but with a chill on the wind. I wandered down Carders, and, feeling invigorated by the fresh air, stopped at the first likely bar and tried to eat some bread and cheese, washed down with coffee. When I had finished I continued in the direction of the sea, but with no particular objective in mind. I passed a cash machine and looked at my bank balance. I was behind with the rent, and had only sufficient cash remaining for two or three weeks’ subsistence. I withdrew money anyway, realising it was impossible for me to consider the future as anything more than a hypothesis in my current frame of mind, and headed for a bar I knew that specialised in seafood tapas and pink cava. The bar was noisy and filled with excited voices. Barça football club must have had a home match on that day: many of the customers were turned out in blue and red striped shirts. There was a satisfying atmosphere of exuberance in the bar. I had several cavas, and by the time I staggered out, the short-lived day was already turning to dusk. I walked past the central post office, re-crossed Laietana, and headed towards the church of Santa María del Mar.